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BREAKING
Sheikh Qassem: Our supporters make up more than half of Lebanon's population, and all of these people are united under the banner of protecting Lebanon, its Resistance, its people, and its integrity.
Sheikh Qassem: There will be no phased handing in of our arms. [The Israelis] must first enact the agreement before we start talking about a defensive strategy.
Sheikh Qassem: Be brave in the face of foreign pressures, and we will be by your side in this stance.
Sheikh Qassem: Stripping us of our arms is like stripping us of our very soul, and this will prompt us to show them our might.
Sheikh Qassem: We will not abandon our arms, for they gave us dignity; we will not abandon our arms, for they protect us against our enemy.
Sheikh Qassem: The US efforts we are seeing are aimed at sabotaging Lebanon and constitute a call for sedition.
Sheikh Qassem: If you truly want to establish sovereignty and work for Lebanon’s interests, then stop the aggression.
Sheikh Qassem: The United States, which is meddling in Lebanon, is not trustworthy but rather poses a danger to it.
Sheikh Qassem: The United States is preventing the weapons that protect the homeland.
Sheikh Qassem: The government’s latest decision [on the disarmament of the Resistance] is non-charter-based, and if the government continues down this path, it is not faithful to Lebanon’s sovereignty.

All rich countries to be hit with declining population

  • By Al Mayadeen English
  • Source: Bloomberg
  • 24 Jun 2022 15:47
3 Min Read

Japan's shrinking population isn't unique to the island, as this is a problem shared by all rich countries.

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  • Almost every country in Europe lies below the 2.1 level needed to maintain the population
    Almost every country in Europe lies below the 2.1 level needed to maintain the population

Japan's shrinking population is an obsession of the world, and even in Japan, the issue has raised so many alarms that one paper called for the declaration of a "declining birth-rate state of emergency."

However, the problem isn't unique to Japan, as the island country is to the fertility crisis what low-lying Pacific islands are to the environmental crisis (in terms of rising sea levels). They are both just an early signal of the problems that will affect others later on.

The first time Japan took notice of its low fertility rates was in 1989, when the country's Total Fertility Rate (TFR) was found to be 1.57, much lower than the 2.1 needed for a population to sustain itself.

Read more: Depopulation, not overpopulation will be one of the true crises of the century

Moreover, despite three decades of effort, including task forces and government support program, little has changed, as Japan had a record low FTR of 1.26 in 2005, which it managed to raise to 1.3 in 2021. But Japan isn't the only country to suffer from this, as the phenomenon seems to be tied to an inverse relationship between wealth and fertility. 

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In Japan, Okinawa, which is the country's poorest region, consistently has the highest fertility rates, while the rich region of Tokyo has the lowest.  

Almost every country in Europe also lies below the 2.1 level, as Croatia, Portugal and Greece may all decline to similar levels to Japan's in the next three decades.

The issue isn't particular to Japan's problems, be it "low gender equality" that Western pundits have long used to explain the phenomenon, or institutional. For example, Taiwan, which lies in the same geographical region as Japan, and calls itself the most "gender-equal society in Asia", has a TFR rate of 1.08, the worst in the world.

Germany, Italy, Finland, and Hungary, for example also have different gender norms and different public policies to support families and working mothers, but they all share a consistently low TFR, the same goes for the US which has a low fertility rate of 1.66.

The answer to the problem is not suggested to be new policies, according to some experts quoted by Bloomberg, but adaptation. Rather than trying to increase births and change people's minds, the governments in question may want to focus on a mix of integrating women and immigrants to top up the workforce, and help those who lack the opportunity to have children or get married.

Until then, the population of the world's rich countries will continue to deteriorate, as their workforce becomes consistently older, and the young workforce is unable to fill in their shoes.

  • Japan
  • population decrease
  • depopulation

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